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Food Court Civic Center
The Food Court Civic Center, also called the FCCC or FC3, is the primary location for Bump Island civic events and public recreational services. Architecture The FCCC was intended as the food court for McIntire’s bumper car park. When McIntire’s project eventually stalled, it was the largest and most complete building on the island. The building is modeled to look like Noah’s Ark, standing above the water on the west side of the island. The building is accessed by a 10 ft. wooden bridge. Built according to the dimensions laid out it the bible, the FCCC is 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high. Events UNESCO World Heritage Site Nomination Bump Islanders have repeatedly attempted to get the FCCC on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In 1998, the United Nations commission released this public statement as a response: Please stop asking. Why would we let you on our beautiful beautiful list? Grand Prix Crash of 2017 MLBC driver Milo Borges crashed into the Food Court Civic Center during the Bump Island Grand Prix in 2017. Media Response The event received worldwide attention, notably after The New York Times ran a photo of the ensuing fire on the front page of its September 21st issue. The photo showed the north half of the ark consumed by a large cloud of black smoke. The following weekend, The Baffler ''published a viral op-ed by Kate Wagner responding to the image: For a few, ''The New York Times published a harrowing photo of the biblical Noah’s Ark consumed by flames, the photo resonating in accordance to the ark’s long-held symbolic meanings- protection, preservation. But many of us couldn’t make these connections . Bump Island is a simulation of a country and the FCCC is a simulacrum of a religious object. While it‘s true that have we transitioned to a more secular world, I would argue that the response to the NYT photo points to a larger transition- that it has become almost insurmountably difficult to create, share, and interpret images along the lines of a shared and legible symbolic meaning. The ark was manufactured as a commercial project, a far-removed, vague gesture to its origin as an Old Testament story. It’s current role on Bump Island is even further removed from McIntire’s vision. When we look at the Ark burning, we’re seeing a widely reproduced image, presented in a million different ways by a million different people to a million different ends. It gets harder to wrestle out conherent meaning when we add that the FCCC has been put forward as a somewhat clunky symbol of Bump Island nationalism. Further, this nationalism has been forced onto McIntire’s Christian project, its relationship with the original bible story inevitably distorted by Bump Island’s status as commercial venture. What we’ve arrived at is a moment when global capital and the technologies of information proliferation have taken away any kind of discernible history or origin to anything. From here on out, we only have hyper-mediated, floating, contextless objects to endlessly remix as we grow more bored by the day.